One of definite positives of travelling alone (and forgetting that you own an iPod) is that you get to overhear amusing statements and conversations spill from the mouths of strangers around you…

Mid-20s woman in the audience of The Nutcracker, during intermission: I like the ballet but it’s hard for me to sit still for so long.

Seriously, lady? The first half of the show was 40 minutes. I might have understood this from the six-year-old sitting next to her… although that six-year-old was also sitting next to me, and she was prone to chewing her chocolate chip cookies really loudly with her mouth open. During the performance.

I think I got the dud row.

Woman talking to the shop assistant at a New-Age/Yoga store in Charleston: Let’s get down to the nit and the grit.

Isn’t the phrase “the nitty gritty”? Or did I just discover another point of linguistic difference between the US and Australia? Also, I was maybe going to relay more of this conversation, but decided not to on account of it including rather extensive (albeit hilarious) talk about candida.

Museum worker talking to a tourist interested in Southern cuisine: My grandfather used to do his own slaughtering, and when I was a young girl I used to grab the chitlins before they’d been cleaned and swing them around to watch the poop fly out. I’ve never been able to eat chitlins, I guess because of that. But I hear they taste good.

I think I’ll pass on them too, thanks all the same.

From chocolate reviews to, um, intestines and candida? I think I need more sleep.

I indeed have the hearing on an owl. (Barred Owl by Alexander Mody, Youth Photographer of the Year in the Nature's Best Photography Awards. National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC)

Aaargh this post has put me in a rather frustrated frame of mind because I know that in the last 2 weeks I overheard something that I knew I had to tell you about (it was right up there with the soccer ball / apple comment) and I simply can’t remember it! I didn’t have my book with me so I couldn’t write it down and now its gone 🙁 A classic of recent times however was when I walked in to a grog shop on Christmas Eve and there was a queue to the back of the store and the shop person asked: “is there anybody waiting?” Clearly yes.

That does seem rather bizarre, but as someone who’s worked in retail over the Christmas period, I can’t help feeling he’d/she’d just been treated so poorly that the cognitive processes weren’t up to scratch.

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About

Hannah. Writer, editor, firm believer in socks, gin, laughter, buttered toast, cheesecake, and semicolons. Currently back in Canberra after two years living in Canada; heart tingling to see what happens next.